The year that changed everything for our customers

2020 has been a year that we’ll never forget. It’ll be a year we look back on from the future and realize that the global pandemic changed everything in the way we live, work and play – and specifically a transformative shift for IT and how they manage their data, their time, and their operations. Over the past several months, IT has had a keen focus on better managing cash flow, responding to dynamic changes, and enabling company-wide shifts to work from anywhere – all while keeping their data protected and their businesses always-on. Now with an eye to the future, CIOs recognize that to accelerate recovery, they must modernize operations and move to an agile, as a service IT model as fast as possible. Agility is now the holy-grail, enabling organizations to react faster to changing customer needs, support unpredictable business demand, and accelerate time to market.

HPE has been on the journey to transform storage and data management for our customers right at the heart of where they need us now more than ever. With an intelligent data platform, we‘ve empowered our customers to move with greater agility by ensuring performance and availability for all their apps, automating operations across their hybrid cloud, and delivering storage as-a-service for their business.

In 2020, HPE has continued to deliver on this strategy with market-leading innovations across intelligence, hybrid cloud and storage as a service. These advancements have helped our customers navigate the enormous challenges of COVID-19, as well as prepare their business for what comes next.

Ensuring apps are always on, always fast with autonomous operations

Intelligent, self-managing storage is a must-have. It removes the burden of managing storage and fighting fires, so that IT can focus on innovating, not administrating. And, HPE InfoSight is the key to intelligence.

Earlier this year we took intelligence to the next level – raising the bar for the industry - by acting on intelligence and extending our cross-stack visibility. HPE Primera, powered with an embedded AI engine, can now self-optimize system operations in real-time. We also announced that HPE InfoSight for HPE Nimble Storage has added support for Hyper-V, an industry-first capability radically simplifying virtual machine management.

Extending data protection to the cloud, the right way

Data is generated faster than ever from edge-to-cloud, and our customers need to modernize data protection to simplify operations, meet every SLA, and unlock the value from their data. Cloud is a logical extension of an organization’s data protection strategy. But it’s not doing enough today – as IT deals with exorbitant egress fees, cloud lock-in, and the inability to use that data for anything more than an insurance policy.

That’s why I’m excited about HPE Cloud Volumes Backup. Launched in June, this new enterprise cloud backup service delivers the simplicity IT wants, but without the egress fees, without the cloud lock-in, and with the protected data easily accessed in the cloud for analytics, test/dev, and so much more. 

Transforming storage to as a service

Our customers want to make the move from managing data centers to providing cloud services. But the challenges of long procurement cycles, up-front capital costs, overprovisioning, and lack of IT resources are slowing them down. The global pandemic has further accentuated these roadblocks, and elevated as-a-service consumption to an urgent priority.

This is why we’ve doubled down on HPE GreenLake for Storage in 2020.  With this unique storage as a service offering, our customers can deliver business outcomes faster, and unlock the full potential of their data with cloud services for storage, optimized for all their workloads. They get the industry-leading storage they need quicker, with ready-to-ship configurations for mission-critical, business-critical, general-purpose, and data protection needs.   And they can scale up and down on demand, only pay for what they use and free up staff to better support strategic business initiatives.

These consumption-based services have been proven to bolster productivity and deployment agility. HPE GreenLake customers saw a 40% increase in IT productivity through a decrease in support loads and a 65% reduction in time-to-market for deploying global IT projects. 

HPE Storage Momentum

I’m proud to say that our intelligent data platform strategy is resonating, and it’s been recognized this year by our customers and the industry. This year we have seen phenomenal momentum, as shown by the market share gains and awards that we have achieved this year.

• HPE grew faster than the Market in External Storage - We outperformed Dell EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage, as shown in IDC's 3Q2020 Worldwide Enterprise External Storage Systems Tracker. In a quarter where the overall market declined, HPE stands out with 7.8 percent year-on-year growth and solid gains in market share.
  
  
• HPE jumped to the #2 Position in Hyperconverged Infrastructure Systems - We continue to outpace our competitors in HCI as shown in IDC's 3Q2020 WW Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker. In a quarter where the industry remained flat and Dell Technologies saw revenue fall, HPE grew over 16% YoY to secure the #2 position in HCI systems.
  
  
• HPE was named a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage - Once again, we were positioned in the Leader’s quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. HPE was positioned further to the right on completeness of vision and further up on the ability to execute relative to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage 2019.
   
• Channel Reseller News awarded HPE top honors for Enterprise Storage and HCI – We were honored to receive not one, but two Product of the Year awards from CRN, demonstrating the satisfaction of our partners and customers with our mission-critical storage solution, HPE Primera, and our intelligent HCI solution, HPE SimpliVity.
  
  
• HPE Nimble Storage dHCI won a prestigious Best of VMworld 2020 award – In recognition to how we are taking HCI further for our customers, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI was chosen as a Best of VMworld 2020 in the category of Virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure, and DevOps. 
  

I’m incredibly proud of our team for these major achievements and thankful for our customers for trusting us with their data.

2020 has been a year that changed everything for our customers – and we are driving a storage and data management strategy that empowers them to look beyond this year. We are inspired by our customers and excited for what’s to come for them and for us in 2021.